Faulkner and Other Ghosts Sing Through Jesmyn Ward’s New Novel

In his wonderfully cranky Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner exhorted his fellow writers to create from the heart, not “the glands.” Address the immortal truths, he instructed: “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

The novelist Jesmyn Ward pinned this speech above her desk. Her memoir and three novels — produced in the span of less than a decade — feel hewn from these grand Faulknerian verities. Not for her the austerity and self-conscious ironies of so much American fiction; her books reach for the sweep, force and sense of inevitability of the Greek myths, but as translated to the small, mostly poor, mostly black town in Mississippi where she grew up and where she still lives.

Her characters are tested not by the gods but by other elements, no less absolute in their pronouncements. “Salvage the Bones” (2011), her National Book Award-winning novel, follows a family caught in Hurricane Katrina (which Ward and her family narrowly survived). “Men We Reaped” (2013), her memoir, is a requiem for five young black men, including the author’s brother, who were lost to murder, suicide and addiction.

However eternal its concerns, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward’s new book, is perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America.

Jojo, the reluctant hero, is a classic Ward protagonist: a tender, ungainly teenager — easy prey. His mother, Leonie, is deep into drugs, and his father, Michael, is languishing in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. It has fallen to Jojo to care for his little sister, with help from his maternal grandparents. (Michael is white, and his family wants nothing to do with his mixed-race children.)

These are Jojo’s burdens. His gifts include a devoted grandfather and an ability to communicate with animals and ghosts that runs in the blood. His mother can see the ghost of her slain brother — but only when she’s high. She gets high a lot.

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CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

The story is set in motion when Michael is slated for release from prison. Leonie, that walking catastrophe, decides to collect him (and perhaps cook a little meth along the way). She hauls her children along, and they unknowingly pick up a mysterious hitchhiker: the ghost of a 12-year-old boy, a former prisoner at Parchman.

In her memoir, Ward chided herself for being too fond of her characters early in her career. “I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs,” she wrote. “All of the young black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that.” She needed, she said, to channel her “Old Testament God.”

I’m happy to report that He is fully in evidence in this novel. It is Ward’s most unsparing book. Leaving aside the instances of explicit violence, the scenes featuring the hunger and confusion of small children are almost physically unbearable.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t missteps. Any writer trafficking in such lofty Faulknerian themes (“love and honor and pity and pride”) risks melodrama, and Ward can get positively melismatic when she strains for poetic effect. “I claw at the air, but my hands strike nothing; they rend no doorways to that golden isle. Absence. Isolation. I keen.”

But we can forgive a few of these excesses. With the supernatural cast to the story, everything feels heightened. The clearest influence is Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” — the child returning from the dead, bitter and wronged and full of questions. The echoes in the language feel like deliberate homage. Just as Beloved looks at her mother with bottomless hunger, so too does the little ghost in “Sing, Unburied, Sing” approach Jojo’s grandfather. He steps “closer and closer to Pop, and he’s a cat then, fresh-born, milk-hungry, creeping toward someone he’d die without.”

What do these ghosts want — and why is literary fiction suddenly so full of them? (See: “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders; “White Tears,” by Hari Kunzru; “Grace,” by Natashia Deón; “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead.) It’s the past that won’t stay past, to paraphrase Faulkner. The ghosts — most of them, at any rate — want to rest, but they need restitution first. They need to know what happened to them, and why. It’s the unfinished business of a nation, playing out today in the calls for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and in the resurgence of the Klan.

What does it mean to come to terms with history, according to Ward’s bracing book? It’s to recognize the preposterousness of the question. “We don’t walk no straight lines,” Jojo’s grandmother tells him on her deathbed. “It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once.”